It seems to me that the inker who inks someone else's work is on the way out. Many comic artist today are inking their own work. Some even have such clean pencils that the are just digitally darkened. And then there are the increasing majority that do everything digitally.So to me a professional inker is someone who draws with ink on paper, whether they are doing it over their own work or someone else's.

It's true that there's more to inking comics than working over other people's pencils. Feel free to throw in the works of the great ink artists as well, but generally I'm interested in the traditional old-school inkers.

Bigger, non-page-fucking version in his Deviantart profile here: http://andybrase.deviantart.com/art/Swamp-Thing-19-INK-only-360681369(adding it with the link tag isn't working for some reason so just cut n paste. Sorry.)

I know the spirit of the whole thread is more about people who ink other people's work but this guy does such good hand-inking on his own stuff I figured he deserved a spot anyway.

Tony Harris sat for 15 minutes talking to me about how he custom mixed his inks to get the dark dark black on his STARMAN pages. He didn't actually tell me the formula, but when I tried a concoction of my own, the first one sucked and caked, and the second one was pure magic.